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How to Rank for a Keyword in 10 Steps

Got your sights on a keyword? Want to see your website on the elusive first page of Google for a given search term? Prepare yourself: Unless you’re Wikipedia or The New York Times, it won’t be easy. But it’s not impossible, either. Seriously – we do it all the time!

Step 1: Lay the Groundwork

This is really more of a pre-step than a first step. You’ll need to have some basics in place before you can hope to rank for any random keyword. These pre-requisites include:

A strong website – The longer your website has been around, accruing authority and links, the better. It’s also key that your entire site follow SEO best practices – start with Google’s Webmaster Guidelines if you don’t know what that means.

A network to draw on – In order to rank quickly for a keyword, it’s very useful to have a built-in network to share new content with – a blog following, an audience on social networks like Facebook and Twitter, email contacts you can reach out to for occasional help with a link. If you don’t know what that means, it’s time to start thinking about link building as relationship building.

Don’t rush this stuff in your race for Internet gold. If you don’t do things right the first time, you’ll just have to do them again later.

Step 2: Do Your Initial Keyword Research

You may think you know what keyword you want to target, but fact-check your instincts. Use several keyword tools to get a sense of the search volume for the keyword as well as the competition before you finalize your keyword choice. Your main considerations will include:

Choosing a keyword with good volume, but not too much volume – In general you don’t want to target a keyword that has low relative search volume if there’s an equivalent term that is much more popular. For example, there are usually over twice as many searches for “blah blah jobs” versus “blah blah careers.” However, don’t always automatically go for the keyword with the highest volume; some keywords are simply too competitive and not worth your time. You’re not going to rank for “airline” unless you are, in fact, an airline.

Choosing a keyword that’s relevant to your business model – You’re more likely to succeed in ranking for a keyword if the term is relevant to your site and your business. You’re also more likely to get some real return on your ranking – remember that rankings in and of themselves aren’t particularly valuable, unless they’re driving worthwhile traffic and leads. For example, a party planning business might target “how to cook for a party” – but “how to cook rice” isn’t really going to be relevant to them or their target audience.

At this stage of the process, you should also make a list of close variations on your primary keyword. These will be helpful in writing and optimizing your content later on.

Step 3: Check Out the Competition

Once you’ve settled on a keyword, do a search for it on Google and a few other search engines to see what your competition is already doing. Pay particular attention to:

The domains and URLs – How many are exact match domains? Does every URL in the top 10 include the keyword?

The types of businesses that are ranking – Are they huge brands? Small businesses? News sites?

How authoritative those sites are – You can use a plugin like SEO for Firefox to check the age of the sites in the top 10, the size of their link profiles and so on.

You’re looking for ways that you can differentiate yourself. You’ll need to do at least as much as your competitors are doing to beat them. Ideally, you should be doing more, and doing it better.

Step 4: Consider Intent

The more specific the keyword (think long-tail keywords), the easier it is to gauge the searcher’s intent, and the easier it will be to serve up what those searchers are probably looking for. In search marketing, “intent” is our best guess at what the person using the search query really wants. Consider the following keywords and notice how much easier it is to guess the intent from the words alone as you go down the list:

glasses

eyeglasses

discount eyeglasses

discount eyeglasses frames

discount eyeglasses frames for kids

Ask yourself, what kind of content best serves the keyword? In this case, it would obviously be a selection of kid’s eyeglasses for sale. From the first term, you can’t even tell if the person is looking for eyeglasses or drinking glasses. And even for the second, the person might just be looking for pictures of eyeglasses; there is no clear intent to buy. An e-commerce business is mostly going to be trying to rank for commercial keywords.

Google’s founders have said that the perfect search engine would serve only one result. You want to be that one result that satisfies the searcher’s need so they don’t bounce back to the search results, looking for a better answer.

Step 5: Conceptualize the Content

Next, form a plan for the actual content you’re going to create that will – hopefully – rank for your chosen keyword. There are many paths to ranking for a keyword, including but not limited to:

An article

A blog post

A product page

An index or directory of links (to other pages on your site or around the web)

An authoritative guide

An infographic

A video

How long will it take to create the content? Who should create it? Will you be doing everything in-house or outsourcing? Do you have all the resources and budget you need? Don’t get defeated: No matter your size or your budget, you have the ability to create a blog post. Content like infographics and videos will require more resources. Sometimes, the best way to answer a search query is with some sort of tool, like a mortgage calculator. If this is the case, you'll need engineering resources.

Step 6: Execute

Here’s where the rubber meets the road. Execute on your plan. Again, you shouldn’t rush any of these steps, but it’s especially important not to rush this one. More and more, search engines are looking for high-quality content that benefits the searcher, not keyword-stuffed spam or pages full of ads that only benefit you. If you’d rather buy traffic than put in the effort it requires to earn “free” organic search traffic, investigate PPC. “SEO isn’t easy” should be your mantra.

Step 7: Optimize for Your Keyword

In reality, steps 6 and 7 should be intertwined. Optimize your content while you’re creating it, rather than applying optimization after the fact. This is where the list of keywords you formulated in step 2 comes in. Leverage those keywords where you can in your content, but not to the point of sounding like a crazy robot. Remember that there are a lot of “invisible” places for keywords, and I’m not talking about using white text on a white background or anything else that violates Google guidelines. I mean stuff like image file names – users won’t see these if they’re not looking for them, but they can increase your keyword rankings.

For a full list of on-page optimization factors, check out SEOmoz’s guide to the “perfect” page. Another good tip is to copy Wikipedia, whose pages tend to have stellar on-page optimization.

Before you hit “publish,” it’s a good idea to quickly double-check your keyword research. It’s possible that your content has evolved during the development and creation phases, and you’ll need to make sure that there’s still alignment between keyword and content.

Step 8: Publish

It’s (finally) time to push your content out into the world. Depending on the type of content it is, you may need to be careful about scheduling this step. This isn’t usually a consideration for evergreen content, but it may be important for content that’s tied to something in the news, an event or a trend. You may also need to coordinate with PR or other interested parties at your company, for example when launching content related to a new product or service.

Step 9: Promote

This step is important and should come immediately after publishing – in fact, for big pieces of content, it’s great if you can do some media outreach before the piece goes live. Make sure you do what you can to get your content in front of as many eyeballs as possible before it even has a chance to rank for the keyword:

Use social buttons or widgets on your site to promote independent sharing – Make it easy for readers and viewers to keep the chain going. They’re more likely to tweet or share your article if all they have to do is click a button.

Accruing page views and social shares will help you accrue links, which will help you earn that ranking.

Step 10: Analyze

You’re not quite done yet! The web is a living medium, and it’s never too late to better optimize your content. Check your keyword ranking manually (be sure you’re signed out and not seeing overly personalized results) or with a rank checking tool. Also use your analytics to see what keywords your content is actually ranking for – they might not be the exact ones you initially targeted. If, after a couple of weeks or so, you’re not ranking for the right keywords, you have more work to do. Make sure that your content:

Is truly optimized

Is truly high-quality

Is truly visible

It’s also possible that the keyword you chose is too competitive and you need to scale back your ambition. Try targeting less competitive keywords until you’ve built up more authority.

That’s it! This is the process we follow to rank for hundreds of keywords related to search marketing. Whatever your business niche, you can make the same process work for you. So GET STARTED!

I have always said that SEO isn't hard work, it is just a lot of work. I think this is more often than not why a business will choose to hire an SEO consultant or an SEO company to handle the work for them. Most would prefer to keep thier mind on their own business and let someone else do all the "grunt" work that comes along with SEO activities. IMO

Very informative article regarding how to rank for a keyword. The best thing about this article that it only recommends white hat seo for keyword ranking. Most authors on the other hand sstuff their article with suggesstions that even include grey or black hat seo which eventually penalize a site.

Thanks for the information but i would like to know how can i rank single keyword in the top of search engines with off page optimization techniques.Is it just creating links with that keyword ? i mean backlinks ?

Great article! Very well written and thorough. May favorite is the conceptualize the content area. It's so important to have a variety of articles and videos etc so that you can become a resource for your audience. Great job!

A piece of advice: Picking highly competetive keywords like in your snapshot example may not be the wisest move for a new website. Choose low or medium and a local search volume (broad) of 500 to 5000. Once you manage to rank THOSE you can think bigger by adding website content with stronger keywords.

How do you think? If we are doing a blog post in any other form with just content and if we are not hyperlinking any of the keywords in it . is it useful for Keyword ranking? Or if people have much more links on the single keyword that is if we can take the example of Email Marketing interspire.com is having more 1000 links with Anchor "Email Marketing"But still Icontact.com is on top with very few links..Can we get the correct idea with lesser number of links also we can rank on few strategies.

Nice stuff, I want to know that how much links I have to get to rank a keyword with 0.29 competition score in Google adwords? Search volume is big but competition is low and please also tell from where I have to get those links forums, blogs or social media?

Very basic, and doing the above will only get you ranking for low comp keywords, if it were this easy I'm sure we'd all be millionaires.No offence, but I bet the author has never ranked a website high in the serps for any keyword higher than a low comp.

If you want my advice, abandon the sinking ship that is Google right now. Head on over to Bing and Yahoo, their search results are much more relevant now a days. It appears as though Google is more obsessed with combatting spammers than delivering relevent results. This is just what I have been noticing while trying to search for general information and, I have noticed that I am not the only one seeing this. I would be interested to know what everyone else's thoughts are on the subject.

Amazing content. Thank you so much! I had previously been studying these topics but the idea of how to actually RANK the keyword once it was included and uploaded as content somewhere confused me. But now I totally dig it. Thanks again.

IIt doesn't matter how well you know this process, seeing it in writing - and so well written - is a great help. I will share your link with some writer friends who are just getting on the keyword bandwagon.

Thats really a very wonderful stat. I can see you’re already doing well with your new niche sites. Kudos.I too believe so much that SEO is still very vital towards the success of any blog new or old. Thank God I’m beginning to learn the act small small.I’m also working on creating some niche sites of which i will register one of the domains tomorrow.I’ve really learnt much from you my man. Keep it up the SEO master..Haha.Enjoy your weekend and here is to our success.

thanks Elisa for this nicely decorated article. I have a question, how to outrank a strong competitor. Say My site has better content, but its too new and some of the competitors in top 10 are there for many years. What to do in that case?

Great Post. I absolutely loved the info I am doing On Page SEO for my website techhoney.com (dealing with HTML, PLSQL and Oracle ERP). I haven't yet started Off Page SEO. If I search "PL SQL Synonyms" in Google.com my site ranks 2nd or 3rd, but as soon as I search for "Oracle PL SQL Synonyms" my site goes way down to 8th or 9th spot. Can you please tell me the reason for such a behavior? (I am new to SEO) Thanks in Advance

Nice post... backlinks really are necessary for SEO but they are really difficult to get.... It seems that Google is on its way to dish out some new alogrithm changes now... maybe its time for the Zebra Update